Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Resources: Addressing Climate Change

EPA developed a variety of publicly available resources to ensure EPA staff and state and local partners continue to develop the necessary capacity and tools to support integrating climate change considerations into enforcement and compliance activities. EPA climate change enforcement and compliance assurance resources for use by regulated entities to stay in compliance can also help state and local communities prepare for and recover more quickly from extreme weather events.

EPA’s enforcement and compliance assurance program will continue to provide technical assistance to drinking water and wastewater systems to help them return systems to compliance, build operator capacity, and ensure ongoing sustainable, clean, and safe water that can withstand climate change.

In October 2022, EPA issued the OECA Climate Adaptation Implementation Plan, which identifies actions to ameliorate the potential impacts of climate change on the agency’s enforcement and compliance assurance program’s mission and operations and specifies priority actions to undertake.

The following resources, tools, and trainings were developed by EPA and other federal agencies to assist with combatting, adapting, and building resilience to the impacts from climate change.

• OECA’s Compliance Advisors for Sustainable Water Systems fact sheet provides information on one-on-one technical assistance to state and local drinking water and wastewater systems experiencing compliance problems that serve smaller communities, many of which are underserved and overburdened by pollution. The technical assistance is intended to bring these systems into compliance, build operator capacity, and provide sustainable, clean, and safe water that is adaptive and resilient to changes in climate.
• FedCenter.gov is the federal government's website for comprehensive environmental stewardship and compliance assistance information for federal facility managers and their agencies, and provides continually updated climate adaptation resources, tools, and lessons learned.
• Incorporating Sustainability Principles in CERCLA and RCRA Cleanup Enforcement Actions reinforces EPA position on incorporating sustainability in cleanup enforcement work. Additionally, the website provides a case compendium that highlights enforcement settlement agreements that include sustainability principles and a resource library that provides access to EPA, other federal agencies, and external organizations information on sustainability principles.
• Climate Resilience Evaluation and Awareness Tool (CREAT): Assists water sector utilities in assessing climate-related risks to utility assets and operations. Contains five modules for users to consider climate impacts and identify adaptation options to increase resilience.
• EPA’s Adaptation Resource Center (ARC-X): Interactive resource to help local governments effectively deliver services to their communities, even as the climate changes, by creating an integrated package of information tailored specifically to their needs. Provides information about: the risks posed by climate change to the issues of concern; relevant adaptation strategies; case studies illustrating how other communities have successfully adapted to those risks and tools to replicate their successes; and EPA funding opportunities.
• EPA’s Green Infrastructure for Climate Resiliency website provides information about how green infrastructure practices can help communities plan for and manage the effects of climate change, including managing flooding, preparing for drought, reducing urban heat islands, lowering building energy demands, spending less energy managing water, and protecting coastal areas.
• The Superfund Climate Resilience website provides an overview of climate-related initiatives within the Superfund program and shares information about strategies that can be used to evaluate and strengthen climate resilience at Superfund sites.
• The Climate Smart Brownfields Manual us a resource for communities that want to consider climate change as they assess, clean up, and redevelop brownfield sites. The manual provides communities with best practices and case studies regarding climate change mitigation, adaption, and resilience from planning to redevelopment of brownfields.
• Greener Cleanups website provides information on the practice of considering all environmental effects of remedy implementation and incorporating options to minimize the environmental footprints of cleanup actions.
• Climate Resilience and Adaptation Funding Toolbox is a user-friendly resource for technical assistance providers working with federal funding applicants and recipients to develop, apply for and implement climate-resilient investments. The website provides simple, easy-to-understand resources that can help users consider climate adaptation and resilience before, during and after applying for EPA funding opportunities.
• Coastal Storm Modeling System (CoSMoS): is a dynamic geographic information system or GIS modeling approach developed by the U.S. Geological Survey to allow more detailed predictions of coastal flooding due to storm-induced coastal flooding, erosion, and cliff failures over large geographic scales.